We Waste Good Celebration Time: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves on HD

“Because it’s dull, you twit. It’ll hurt more.”

I would have been around ten years old when Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came out. We had a copy on VHS, and I must have watched it a million times. Even without having seen it again in probably three decades, I could still have recited large portions of it before I sat down with this new 4K release.

I remember the Bryan Adams song, which had a music video at the end of the VHS. Interestingly, the music video in question seems to have fallen down some sort of bottomless rights rabbit hole, and if you go looking for it online, all you’ll find are endless YouTube videos speculating about why it’s impossible to turn it up anywhere – it’s also nowhere to be found on the new 4K from Arrow.

Back then, though, the music video was inescapable. The song was nominated for an Academy Award, which it lost to the title song from Beauty and the Beast, though I personally always preferred the similar song from the 1993 version of The Three Musketeers – another movie I watched until the wheels fell off.

I never played the official video game for the NES, but I had an issue of Nintendo Power dedicated to it. I never owned any of the action figures, but I remember them being on store shelves. Which is all to say that Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was something of a phenomenon, raking in nearly $400 million at the box office, beating out Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Hook, and Silence of the Lambs, and only being bested by the juggernaut that was Terminator 2.

I remember how the hat trick of Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, and this made Kevin Costner inescapable at the box office for a few years – never mind that his performance here beautifully sets Cary Elwes up for the gag in Robin Hood: Men in Tights where he says, “Unlike other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent.”

In fact, how well I remember Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is likely only partly due to how often I watched this movie when I was a kid. It probably has as much to do with how often I’ve watched Robin Hood: Men in Tights since, given that Mel Brooks’s parody follows this one nearly beat for beat, to the point that one joke I remembered from Men in Tights is actually in this movie.

My spouse had no such rosy memories of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. When I brought up the prospect of watching it to them, they made a face, and dismissed it as being part of the raft of gritty, depressing historical reimaginings that came out in the 90s. At the time, that didn’t match my recollection, but upon re-watching it, I can see how Prince of Thieves could feel of a piece with them.

At times, the tone of Prince of Thieves seems to be at war with itself. It wants to be a historically plausible retelling, rooted in grit and grime and extremely dimly lit castle interiors, but the screenplay is filled with jokes and even occasional visual gags. “[The screenwriters] broke with the traditional account of Robin as a devil-may-care adventurer (best embodied by Errol Flynn in 1938) by reimagining him as a rich kid transformed into a socially conscious rebel by imprisonment in Jerusalem during the Crusades,” writes Garth Pearce at Entertainment Weekly.

None of that felt weird to me in 1991, probably because this might have been my first Robin Hood movie, with the possible exception of the 1973 Disney animated version, which singlehandedly stirred the sexual awakenings of a generation of furries.

I have since seen plenty of other, often better, Robin Hood movies, including that aforementioned Errol Flynn one from ’39, which is the gold standard for a reason. Heck, even Men in Tights is, in many ways, a better Robin Hood movie. But, for what it’s trying to be, Prince of Thieves is actually pretty good, and mostly deserves its blockbuster status.

There’s a decent cast, including Morgan Freeman being a movie star and Michael Wincott being oily. Even Costner’s Robin of Locksley has genuine charisma, despite “embarrassing rumors that his performance was too laid-back and his accent more L.A. than U.K.”

It is Alan Rickman as the nefarious Sheriff of Nottingham who seems to best understand the film’s odd tone, however, “[tearing] into the part with a gusto that bordered on glee, storming through Nottingham Castle, barking such commands as ‘No more merciful beheadings! And call off Christmas!’”

In fact, without Rickman, it’s possible that Prince of Thieves could have become the dour picture that my spouse remembered it as, in spite of all the other winking and joking in the script.

“As moviegoers poured out of a Robin Hood test screening in Sacramento in April,” writes Pearce, “they left the filmmakers with a real problem. Although the movie scored a resounding approval rating of 92 percent […] when people were asked their favorite character, they picked not Costner’s Robin but Rickman’s sheriff.” Or, as one crew member apparently put it during Pearce’s set visit, “Rickman’s acting Costner off the screen.”

Today, Rickman may unfortunately be best known for his portrayal of Severus Snape in the various Harry Potter movies, but back then he was most familiar to American audiences for having played the equally flamboyant (if perhaps a little less silly) terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard in 1988.

Here, Rickman may steal the show, but it’s less because he’s out-acting his compatriots – although he did receive a BAFTA Award for his role – than because he seems to be the only one who is entirely in tune with the odd rhythm of the picture that they’re making.

This may have had something to do with events going on behind the scenes. Director Kevin Reynolds apparently objected to screenwriter Pen Densham’s original script, which Densham described as “Robin Hood a la Raiders [of the Lost Ark].” Reynolds felt that approach had “been done already,” and that the version of the Sheriff of Nottingham on the page was “too one-dimensional, a medieval Darth Vader,” so Reynolds “worked for weeks to inject some wit into the role.”

According to Rickman, he wasn’t the only one. At a BAFTA celebration highlighting his career in 2015, Rickman claimed that he went behind the producer’s back to have some screenwriter friends punch up his part. “I said, ‘Will you have a look at this script because it’s terrible, and I need some good lines.’”

Which sounds pretty bad, until you read on and find that perhaps the only line they actually added is the one where the sheriff says to two wenches in a doorway, “You. My room. 10:30 tonight. You, 10:45. And bring a friend.”

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.